Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [4]
The future, she’d decided, wasn’t what it used to be.
‘Well... yeah. Sort of.’
London in 2012 was turning out to be nothing more than a slightly smoggier, considerably more crowded version of the London that she knew. When the Doctor had first told her where they were going, she’d expected a fascinating sightseeing trip, all futuristic buildings and The Jetsons, moving pavements and videophones on every street corner. She hadn’t expected to land in a dingy multi-storey carpark in Covent Garden just so that he could ‘pick up his post’.
She looked up into the baby blue summer sky, heartbreakingly devoid of flying cars, as the Doctor ummed and ahhed in the background, like a maiden aunt admiring someone else’s child. There was something strangely right about the Doctor – dressed like a schoolteacher in a brown, tweedy jacket and a cream hat, umbrella hooked absently over his wrist, paisley scarf draped almost foppishly around his shoulders – poring over antique timepieces. Ace imagined that if he hadn’t been a time traveller, righter of wrongs and universal man of mystery, he could quite easily have been that odd little man who ran the antiques shop on the corner – the shop that no one ever seemed to go into, and local kids were scared stiff of.
The air was warmer and muggier than Ace had expected, even at the fag end of summer, doped with unfamiliar chemicals and perfumes. It felt more alien than some of the worlds the Doctor had taken her to, that subtle sideways shift of everything familiar, everything she expected from Earth. Fashions were recognisable but just that little bit extreme: even in the heat of summer, long coats in billowing, shiny fabric like parachute silk seemed to be in, hanging and flowing around their wearers in ways that seemed just wrong. Short hair, cropped into spirals and whorls, was clearly the rage – which Ace rather approved of. She turned to ask the Doctor whether he thought a crewcut would suit her, and found him stepping out of the clock shop, beaming, and shaking hands with the shopkeeper. She hadn’t even realised he’d gone inside.
‘Right!’ he said brightly, tipping his hat back with the handle of his umbrella.’We’d better be off! Time and Her Majesty’s Mail wait for no man. Come on Ace.’ Something silvery slipped from his hand into his pocket and he turned on his heel and headed off in the direction of Carnaby Street. Ace pulled a ‘what’s the use?’ face at the smiling shopkeeper and trotted after the Doctor.
As they strolled down Oxford Street, Ace felt an inexplicable glow of pride at the rainbow diversity around her. People of all colours swarmed and thronged, bees in a multicultural hive.
When she’d been a child, London had always been an exciting melting pot of cultures and ethnic diversity – and a place that her aunts constantly warned her about, despite the fact that she lived just a few tube stops away. Bad Things happened in London, they told her: the men were rogues, and the women were little more than tarts. Even when Ace’s mother had taken on her first big trip to London – to see some tacky musical, she vaguely remembered – there were still hushed whisperings, mutterings of disapproval. But she’d loved it and been scared by it at the same time, excited to be old enough to taste a little of the big metropolis, but not old enough to have to take a big bite of it on her own.
And now, on an improbably unchanged Carnaby Street, she could taste a little of that same excitement tingling away inside her stomach. Tattoos and bizarre – but hugely desirable! –
piercings and strange hairdos, electronic devices wrapped around the sides of heads or nestling at people’s throats; small touches that spoke of the gulf between Ace’s world and this one. She looked down at her own, badge-infested bomber jacket and black jeans and felt rather dull. She leaned in to the Doctor.
‘Professor, are